Theater video tags: New York Public Library

“There’s something about straight lines on a page and the ability to use punctuation in an expected and familiar way that changes the way you do honesty on the page.” Poet and essayist Camonghne Felix speaks about mental health and heartbreak, and the vulnerability she found in writing her debut memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023), for this Live From NYPL event with multi-disciplinary artist Bunny Michael.

“Literature is there to show us how there can be beauty in meaning, and this is what makes the literary experience so unique...and I’m hunting for this feeling all the time.” Hernan Diaz, author most recently of Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speaks about his relationship with reading, writing, and language in this Louisiana Channel interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library.

“It’s all about providing access, not only to education, not only to learning, but also to a free public space where people can actually come together and engage,” says copresident Andreas Dracopoulos of the newly renovated and transformed Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, a branch of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan that reopened in June.

In this New York Public Library video, assistant curator Charles Cuykendall Carter shows off Les Portes Fermées, ou, Les Doubles Surprises (The Closed Doors, or The Double Surprises), a new acquisition of the Pforzheimer Collection. The small nineteenth-century French toy book is comprised of seven miniature romance and trickery stories, each accompanied by an illustration with a door flap opening onto a surprise illustration that appears when the card is held up to the light.